Credentials

Background

Robert. E. Davis is a professor at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D in climatology from the University of Delaware.

According to his profile at the Independent Institute, Davis was a Member of the Expert Panel on Global Change Research Strategy for the Environmental Protection Agency, Member of the Data Management Advisory Panel of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a contributor to the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has testified on climate change before the House Science Committee. He is also listed as an editor of Climate Research journal. [3]

Tech Central Station lists him as past president of the climatology specialty group of the Association of American Geographers and past-chair of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Biometeorology and Aerobiology. [4]

Stance on Climate Change

“The question everyone should ask is not 'Is the earth warming,' but, 'How is the warming being felt across the planet? Where is it warming? When? And by how much?'
It turns out that most of the warming is occurring in the high latitudes, in the winter, and across the planet, at night.” [5]

Key Quotes

“…the temperature record at the surface is a contaminated record and urbanization needs to be factored out of that if we're going to get any kind of accurate representation of how surface temperatures have changed over the last hundred years.” [5]

According to the video description, “Fourteen experts present evidence to show how current CO2 levels, which are 30 percent higher than in the pre-industrial era, have greatly enhanced the growth of trees and other plants. Results from controlled studies around the world show how a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is expected to occur over the next century, will increase crop yields by 30 to 40 percent, double the water-use efficiency of most of earth’s vegetation and could triple the productivity of forests.”

If you’re going to reduce CO2 emissions from people in the United States, you have to go to the richest source first. And that is the power plants that we all are involved with. This is why this is so alarming to us, because we rely on them.

I say to my Board [of Directors of Western Fuels Association] when we have these discussions, “We have coal plants and we have debt in these institutions. That’s what we have.” When someone starts talking about raising our costs by charging us money to burn our own coal in our own power plants – or to burn American coal in American power plants – to pay money to people in Russia or China, it’s going to come from here first. It has to be, by definition, devastating.

Finding a common ground under these circumstances, given the issues, as they have been defined, not by us… [Well…] We are reacting. We are protecting. We are defending something we think is worthwhile from onslaughts coming from others. [This] requires [that] we engage in this activity in an educational campaign. Not just with respect to the science – that’s what this is about – but also with respect to the benefits of what it is that you do for people. Because you do provide benefits for people.

Cato describes the book as confronting “the exaggerations, opportunism, and myths about global warming that are all too pervasively altering the shape of our lives and provides the tools and insights necessary to push back against the takeover.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

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Cars, air travel, space exploration, television, nuclear power, high-speed computers, telephones, organ transplants, prosthetic body parts… At various times these were all deemed impossible. I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed many technological feats that were once unimaginable. Even 10 or 20 years ago, I would never have guessed people would carry supercomputers in their pockets — your smart phone is...